It is a common and oft-repeated circumstance where visually-impaired persons receive written text which needs to be read to them. Under such a circumstance, these persons seek to satisfy their needs by means of one of the following typical ways.
The visually-impaired persons may rely on their co-workers and family members to read to them. In doing so, these persons disadvantageously forego the privacy associated with the written communication. This method also potentially creates an undue burden on the co-workers or even the family members if they are bothered often enough to read written text which is particularly voluminous. In addition, in spite of this method, the visually-impaired persons cannot have others read the written text immediately to them when situated alone.
The visually-impaired persons may also hire human readers to read to them. Although this solves the above-identified problem of the potential undue burden on others, the disadvantage of the aforementioned lack of privacy remains. Furthermore, even relying on this method, the visually-impaired persons cannot normally afford to have the text read to them immediately after the receipt thereof. This stems from the fact that such a reader service is expensive and certainly not economical to employ it on a full time basis while it is only required sporadically, which is mostly the case. Thus generally, the readers are hired for an hour or two at a time, and written material is saved and accumulated for their service.
Moreover, the visually-impaired persons may resort to commercial devices which employ conventional optical character recognition (OCR) and speech synthesizing techniques. These devices manage to translate the image of text to the corresponding intelligent speech. One category of these devices is comprised of "stand-alone" OCR machines which operate without the aid of additional equipment. In general, such machines are undesirably expensive.
There are commercially available less expensive OCR cards and scanners which can be used as adjuncts to personal computer (PC) systems for performing similar image-to-speech translation. However, not to mention the substantial financial investment in the PCs themselves, the utilization of these cards requires the visually-impaired persons to have some non-trivial training in the use of the PCs. Such a training, often times, creates undesirable hardship to these persons due to their visually disadvantaged condition.
In view of the forgoing, it is desirable for visually-impaired persons to have access to a system that provides a reading service which is responsive, economical, easy to use and substantially private.